Introducion to the workshop

Ladies and Gentlemen,

thank you very much Prof. Grote for your welcome speech.

We are very happy, that you have come to Bochum in such large numbers to take part in the presentations and discussions about the education of mechatronical engineers. In particular I would like to welcome our guests from 19 different countries in Europe and the whole world. We are very pleased that this is a truly international conference.

We would like everyone here to be able to share their experiences in mechatronics education. To make it possible for the participants to have discussions in a small group, we have planned three parallel workgroups. I encourage you to make use of the possibility to get into contact with the other participants.

This workshop has one predecessor. In 1994 the faculty members of Standford University in the USA organized a workshop on mechatronics education. You can find the papers in the internet. University teachers from the USA were the main participants in this workshop.
With this international workshop we wish to establish contacts and exchanges in a world and a field where borders have less meaning in each passing year. Today's workshop is not only a beginning - we believe that is shows great promise for the future.

In wintersemester 1993/94 Fachhochschule Bochum, as a university of applied sciences, established a new degree program for mechatronical engineers. With this degree program we were the first university which offered an independant curriculum of mechatronics in Germany. The first students graduated four years later to take jobs in industry. My colleagues Mr. Frieske, Mr. Janzen, Mr. Sternberg and Mr. Roddeck will inform you of our experiences with this new educational endeavor.

I am very happy that we have Mr. Thiemann with us here today. He is one of our first graduate engineers and will inform you about his experience from the point of view as a student and now as an engineer in industry. His experience as a student in our german-french degree program in mechatronics will surely be of special interest.

The colleagues from our partner universities in the USA, in France, in the United Kingdom and in Singapore will inform you about their experiences and their concepts of mechatronical education.

Earlier this week some participants of our workshop attended an additional introduction to applied mechatronics in Germany.
They visited the following institutions:
Many of the participants found these visits very informative and worthwhile.

Today after four lectures in the morning for the plenum we want to divide into three parallel workgroups after lunch.
In the third workgroup C „Mechatronics curricula: an international comparison" we have had to make some changes:
Instead of M. Récho, M. Trassoudaine from the Université Blaise Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand will hold the lecture about „Mechatronics education in France".
Mr. Kaykayoglu from Istanbul University has had to cancel.
Instead, Mr. Finn Conrad from the Technical University of Denmark will present the educational programme on Engineering Profile in Mechatronics in Denmark and Norway.
Mr. Afzulpurkar from the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok has had to cancel at the last minute for personal reasons.

The information given in the presentations and in the discussions of each workgroup will be presented tomorrow morning. The moderators will give a summary for all participants. We want to publish the lectures and the results in the internet.

Tonight we want to invite you to dinner in medi(a)eval surroundings. The name of the place is Haus Herbede. No, it is not a castle - although it is surrounded by a moat - but an old house of the lord of the manor. This house was first mentioned in documents in the year 1200. It is situated near the Ruhr river and the Kemnade lake.

Tomorrow, on Friday afternoon, we would like to invite you to visit laboratories of some institutes of Fachhochschule Bochum. We would like to show some of the equipment and projects for research and development. If you are interested in this visit, please inform us at the reception desk.

I'd like to take this opportunity to give you some information about the Fachhochschule Bochum. The FH is in the southern part of Bochum near the Ruhr-University Bochum. We have 6 departments and we educate about 4500 students. In addition to three departments for construction

we have a department of electrical engineering and a department of mechanical engineering. The two co-operate in the degree programm of mechatronics. The sixth department is the business department, and uses rooms of the Ruhr-University Bochum.

In addition to the basic degree program of mechatronics we offer a program in cooperation with companies of the region. This course is called Cooperative engineering education (KIA). As a third branch, we offer a German-French degree program in cooperation with the Université Blaise Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand. The students of this program receive two diplomas.

In the field of research and development there are many activities. One example is the research network „TransMechatronik".

My colleagues and I are very interested in starting communication with you as experts in mechatronics education. We like to exchange ideas and to learn from you. To continue this contact we would like to propose the establishment of a Mechatronic-Network. In this network we can inform one another and we can co-operate in different fields. Possibly we may establish this network under the auspices of the SEFI, the European Society for Engineering Education.

After sending our invitation to this workshop via e-mail into the world we received many reactions. Many colleagues congratulated us on our activity and wished us good luck with our conference. Mr. John Lorriman wrote, that he co-authored a book called „Japan's Winning Margins" with Prof. Takashi Kenjo. Prof. Kenjo was the engineer who invented the word „Mechatronics". He was happy to see that mechatronics is also discussed in Germany.

Mechatronics may mean different ways to find a solution for a technical problem, as you can see on this chart.

I would like to thank all our sponsors and supporters for the help they have given us, which has made this workshop possible.

I like to mention the following institutions:
Ministry of school and further education, science and research of Northrhine-Westphalia, Dusseldorf
IGIP, International Society of Engineering Education, Klagenfurt, Austria
SEFI, European Society for Engineering Education, Brussels, Belgium
Adam Opel AG, Bochum
Festo didactic GmbH, Esslingen
Nokia Mobile Phones Produktionsges. mbH, Bochum
Sparkasse Bochum

As we have all observed in our common field of work, there is rapidly growing interest in new degree programs in mechatronics. For that reason Fachhochschule Bochum is already planning to repeat this international workshop in three years in 2002. We would like to show the development of courses in engineering for mechatronical engineers. We would like to invite you now to come again in three years to Bochum.

Last but not least I hope that you will take home many suggestions and much information which you can use at your university. I think this workshop is a good opportunity to establish and reinforce your personal networks. I hope that you will enjoy your time here in Bochum and I would like to invite you to take an active part: the workshop will profit from this and so will you. I hope you will take a rich harvest home with you although it's only the beginning of spring.


1999-07-19 webmaster@mechatronics-net.de